The Pleasure Merchant
“Forgive me, but I’m having some difficulty ascertaining exactly where magnetic north lies on your moral compass.”
London, 177—:
Apprentice wig-maker Tom Dawne’s dream is to complete his training, marry his master’s daughter, and set up a shop of his own. Unfortunately for him, when one of his greatest creations is used to play a cruel prank on a powerful gentleman, Tom is dismissed — and forced by fear of poverty and the need to clear his name to serve the very man whom he suspects set him up.
Tom quickly realizes he has bitten off more than he can chew... though as it turns out, it’s not actually more than he desires. As Tom becomes less of a servant and more of a surrogate son, his ambitions change, and so do his pleasures, until it’s no longer easy for Tom to tell if he’s pulling the strings... or trapped in a bizarre web of someone else’s making. Matters become no clearer when Tom meets the mysterious professional libertines who seem to lurk at the center of all his troubles: a man willing to procure anything for anyone, so long as it gives them pleasure, and his obscure assistant, whose past has been irretrievably lost.
Some might even say it was stolen...
From British Fantasy and Wonderland Book Award nominee Molly Tanzer (Vermilion; A Pretty Mouth) comes a novel of despair and desire: The Pleasure Merchant; or, The Modern Pygmalion, equal parts psychological thriller and sensual parlor drama.
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Molly Tanzer
Molly Tanzer is the Sydney J. Bounds and Wonderland Book Award-nominated author of two collections: A Pretty Mouth (Lazy Fascist, 2012) and Rumbullion and Other Liminal Libations (Egaeus, 2013). Her debut novel, Vermilion, was published by Word Horde in April of 2015, and her second novel, The Pleasure Merchant, is forthcoming from Lazy Fascist in November of 2015. She is also the editor of the forthcoming Swords v. Cthulhu (Stone Skin Press). Her Lovecraftian fiction has appeared in venues such as The Book of Cthulhu (I and II) (Night Shade), The Book of the Dead (Jurassic London) and The Starry Wisdom Library (PS Publishing). She has had additional short fiction appear in Schemers (Stone Skin Press), Running with the Pack (Prime Books) and The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, among other places. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and a very bad cat.
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